Swann's Way
aphasia, in the case of the most ordinary words) the name of something
new. It was for ever present in my mind, which could not, however, grow
accustomed to it. I analysed it, I spelt it; its orthography came to me
as a surprise. And with its familiarity it had simultaneously lost its
innocence. The pleasure that I derived from the sound of it I felt to
be so guilty, that it seemed to me as though the others must read my
thoughts, and would change the conversation if I endeavoured to guide it
in that direction. I fell back upon subjects which still brought me into
touch with Gilberte, I eternally repeated the same words, and it was no
use my knowing that they were but words--words uttered in her absence,
which she could not hear, words without virtue in themselves, repeating
what were, indeed, facts, but powerless to modify them--for still
it seemed to me that by dint of handling, of stirring in this way
everything that had reference to Gilberte, I might perhaps make emerge
from it something that would bring me happiness. I told my parents again
that Gilberte was very fond of her governess, as if the statement, when
repeated for the hundredth time, would at last have the effect of making
Gilberte suddenly burst into the room, come to live with us for ever.
I had already sung the praises of the old lady who read the _Débats_
(I had hinted to my parents that she must at least be an Ambassador's
widow, if not actually a Highness) and I continued to descant on her
beauty, her splendour, her nobility, until the day on which I mentioned
that, by what I had heard Gilberte call her, she appeared to be a Mme.
Blatin.
"Oh, now I know whom you mean," cried my mother, while I felt myself
grow red all over with shame. "On guard! on guard!--as your grandfather
says. And so it's she that you think so wonderful? Why, she's perfectly
horrible, and always has been. She's the widow of a bailiff. You can't
remember, when you were little, all the trouble I used to have to avoid
her at your gymnastic lessons, where she was always trying to get hold
of me--I didn't know the woman, of course--to tell me that you were
'much too nice-looking for a boy.' She has always had an insane desire
to get to know people, and she must be quite insane, as I have always
thought, if she really does know Mme. Swann. For even if she does come
of very common people, I have never heard anything said against her
character. But she must always be forcing herself upon strangers. She
is, really, a horrible woman, frightfully vulgar, and besides, she is
always creating awkward situations."
As for Swann, in my attempts to resemble him, I spent the whole time,
when I was at table, in drawing my finger along my nose and in rubbing
my eyes. My father would exclaim: "The child's a perfect idiot, he's
becoming quite impossible." More than all else I should have liked to
be as bald as Swann. He appeared to me to be a creature so extraordinary
that I found it impossible to believe that people whom I knew and often
saw knew him also, and that in the course of the day anyone might run
against him. And once my mother, while she was telling us, as she did
every evening at dinner, where she had been and what she had done that
afternoon, merely by the words: "By the way, guess whom I saw at the
Trois Quartiers--at the umbrella counter--Swann!" caused to burst open
in the midst of her narrative (an arid desert to me) a mystic blossom.
What a melancholy satisfaction to learn that, that very afternoon,
threading through the crowd his supernatural form, Swann had gone to
buy an umbrella. Among the events of the day, great and small, but
all equally unimportant, that one alone aroused in me those peculiar
vibrations by which my love for Gilberte was invariably stirred. My
father complained that I took no interest in anything, because I did not
listen while he was speaking of the political developments that might
follow the visit of King Theodosius, at that moment in France as
the nation's guest and (it was hinted) ally. And yet how intensely
interested I was to know whether Swann had been wearing his hooded cape!
"Did you speak to him?" I asked.
"Why, of course I did," answered my mother, who always seemed afraid
lest, were she to admit that we were not on the warmest of terms with
Swann, people would seek to reconcile us more than she cared for, in
view of the existence of Mme. Swann, whom she did not wish to know. "It
was he who came up and spoke to me. I hadn't seen him."
"Then you haven't quarrelled?"
"Quarrelled? What on earth made you think that we had quarrelled?"
she briskly parried, as though I had cast doubt on the fiction of her
friendly relations with Swann, and was planning an attempt to 'bring
them together.'
"He might be cross with you for never asking him here."
"One isn't obliged to ask everyone to one's house, you know; has he ever
asked me to his? I don't know his wife."
"But he used often to come, at Combray."
"I should think he did! He used to come at Combray, and now, in Paris,
he has something better to do, and so have I. But I can promise you, we
didn't look in the least like people who had quarrelled. We were kept
waiting there for some time, while they brought him his parcel. He
asked after you; he told me you had been playing with his daughter--"
my mother went on, amazing me with the portentous revelation of my own
existence in Swann's mind; far more than that, of my existence in so
complete, so material a form that when I stood before him, trembling
with love, in the Champs-Elysées, he had known my name, and who my
mother was, and had been able to blend with my quality as his daughter's
playmate certain facts with regard to my grandparents and their
connections, the place in which we lived, certain details of our past
life, all of which I myself perhaps did not know. But my mother did not
seem to have noticed anything particularly attractive in that counter at
the Trois Quartiers where she had represented to Swann, at the moment
in which he caught sight of her, a definite person with whom he had
sufficient memories in common to impel him to come up to her and to
speak.
Nor did either she or my father seem to find any occasion now to mention
Swann's family, the grandparents of Gilberte, nor to use the title of
stockbroker, topics as which nothing else gave me so keen a pleasure.
My imagination had isolated and consecrated in the social Paris a
certain family, just as it had set apart in the structural Paris a
certain house, on whose porch it had fashioned sculptures and made its
windows precious. But these ornaments I alone had eyes to see. Just as
my father and mother looked upon the house in which Swann lived as one
that closely resembled the other houses built at the same period in the
neighbourhood of the Bois, so Swann's family seemed to them to be in the
same category as many other families of stockbrokers. Their judgment was
more or less favourable according to the extent to which the family in
question shared in merits that were common to the rest of the universe,
and there was about it nothing that they could call unique. What, on the
other hand, they did appreciate in the Swanns they found in equal, if
not in greater measure elsewhere. And so, after admitting that the house
was in a good position, they would go on to speak of some other house
that was in a better, but had nothing to do with Gilberte, or of
financiers on a larger scale than her grandfather had been; and if they
had appeared, for a moment, to be of my opinion, that was a mistake
which was very soon corrected. For in order to distinguish in all
Gilberte's surroundings an indefinable quality analogous, in the scale
of emotions, to what in the scale of colours is called infra-red, a
supplementary sense of perception was required, with which love, for the
time being, had endowed me; and this my parents lacked.
On the days when Gilberte had warned me that she would not be coming to
the Champs-Elysées, I would try to arrange my walks so that I should
be brought into some kind of contact with her. Sometimes I would lead
Françoise on a pilgrimage to the house in which the Swanns lived, making
her repeat to me unendingly all that she had learned from the governess
with regard to Mme. Swann. "It seems, she puts great faith in medals.
She would never think of starting on a journey if she had heard an
owl hoot, or the death-watch in the wall, or if she had seen a cat
at midnight, or if the furniture had creaked. Oh yes! she's a most
religious lady, she is!" I was so madly in love with Gilberte that if,
on our way, I caught sight of their old butler taking the dog out, my
emotion would bring me to a standstill, I would fasten on his white
whiskers eyes that melted with passion. And Françoise would rouse me
with: "What's wrong with you now, child?" and we would continue on our
way until we reached their gate, where a porter, different from every
other porter in the world, and saturated, even to the braid on his
livery, with the same melancholy charm that I had felt to be latent in
the name of Gilberte, looked at me as though he knew that I was one
of those whose natural unworthiness would for ever prevent them from
penetrating into the mysteries of the life inside, which it was his duty
to guard, and over which the ground-floor windows appeared conscious of
being protectingly closed, with far less resemblance, between the nobly
sweeping arches of their muslin curtains, to any other windows in the
world than to Gilberte's glancing eyes. On other days we would go along
the boulevards, and I would post myself at the corner of the Rue Duphot;
I had heard that Swann was often to be seen passing there, on his way
to the dentist's; and my imagination so far differentiated Gilberte's
father from the rest of humanity, his presence in the midst of a crowd
of real people introduced among them so miraculous an element, that even
before we reached the Madeleine I would be trembling with emotion at
the thought that I was approaching a street from which that supernatural
apparition might at any moment burst upon me unawares.
But most often of all, on days when I was not to see Gilberte, as I
had heard that Mme. Swann walked almost every day along the Allée des
Acacias, round the big lake, and in the Allée de la Reine Marguerite, I
would guide Françoise in the direction of the Bois de Boulogne. It was
to me like one of those zoological gardens in which one sees assembled
together a variety of flora, and contrasted effects in landscape; where
from a hill one passes to a grotto, a meadow, rocks, a stream, a trench,
another hill, a marsh, but knows that they are there only to enable
the hippopotamus, zebra, crocodile, rabbit, bear and heron to disport
themselves in a natural or a picturesque setting; this, the Bois,
equally complex, uniting a multitude of little worlds, distinct and
separate--placing a stage set with red trees, American oaks, like an
experimental forest in Virginia, next to a fir-wood by the edge of the
lake, or to a forest grove from which would suddenly emerge, in her
lissom covering of furs, with the large, appealing eyes of a dumb
animal, a hastening walker--was the Garden of Woman; and like the
myrtle-alley in the Aeneid, planted for their delight with trees of one
kind only, the Allée des Acacias was thronged by the famous Beauties
of the day. As, from a long way off, the sight of the jutting crag from
which it dives into the pool thrills with joy the children who know
that they are going to behold the seal, long before I reached the
acacia-alley, their fragrance, scattered abroad, would make me feel that
I was approaching the incomparable presence of a vegetable personality,
strong and tender; then, as I drew near, the sight of their topmost